Mobile learning in the last mile

Abstract

For every personal computer in a developing country there are roughly five mobile phones. Although many of these continue to be older or low-end models—despite the continued rise of the smartphone—today’s high-end devices have as much processing power as a personal computer did in the mid-1990s. In comparison, personal computers today have more number-crunching ability than all the computers that took the Apollo rocket to the moon over thirty years ago. The boundary between mobile phones, handheld game consoles, entertainment devices, and personal computers is becoming increasingly blurred, with devices such as the Blackberry, Android-driven smartphones, GPS-enabled mobile phones, Ultra Mobile PCs, and tablets breaking new ground. Technology continues to advance at a remarkable pace, opening up new opportunities few people would have considered a few short years ago. Convergence and mobility—and increasingly ‘‘ultra mobility’’—are words on everyone’s minds; even Intel announced a ‘‘major shift to ultra mobility’’ as recently as 2011. According to Dennis Moore, chief executive of OQO, an early pioneer of Ultra Mobile PCs, ‘‘Ultra mobility is the ability to access all of your information, get in touch with anyone you want to, collaborate with anyone, and run any application you want from anywhere on the planet’’ (cited in Waters 2008). While the growth of cloud-based services has been a major driver of this vision, device convergence has also had an important role to play: music, games, video and live television can all now run or stream over a single device, often a mobile phone. The days of carrying a separate phone, camera, games console, and music player are long over. Indeed, many people are beginning to question the use of the word phone at all, preferring to refer to these new gadgets as mobile communication devices, or digital assistants. ‘‘mLearning’’ is a term regularly used to describe the many educational possibilities opened up by this convergence, whether it be getting exam results by mobile phone, watching lessons on mobile video, podcasting a lecture via iPod, or playing structured language games on a Nintendo or Playstation. These are still relatively early days, but